It apparently hasn’t taken very long for scammers to figure out ways to commit fraud with Apple Pay. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur writes that some banks are “scrambling” to fix Apple Pay-related problems on their end that have allowed criminals to use the platform to buy goods with stolen identities and credit card information. More →

A new Snowden leak a few days ago revealed that the NSA and GCHQ conducted a complex hack operation that focused on obtaining the secure encryption keys that protect mobile communications in devices with SIM cards. A subsequent report revealed that the goal of spy agencies might have been a lot bigger, as they may have been hunting for other security keys that would let them deploy spyware on any mobile device with a SIM card inside, and users would have no idea that anything had happened. More →

Following reports that claimed the NSA and GCHQ may have targeted Gemalto, one of the main phone SIM cards makers, the company revealed that such attacks indeed took place in 2010 and 2011, though the hackers were not able to steal SIM keys, as had been reported by the media. More →

I’ve long wondered which would be worse for Lenovo — if the company decided to install the Superfish adware onto its machines despite knowing its potential to be a major security vulnerability, or if it really had no clue about the risks involved with this kind of software. A New York Times interview with Lenovo CTO Peter Hortensius has now left me hoping that Lenovo has just been lying about its foreknowledge of Superfish’s capabilities because the alternative is just too scary. More →

About 18 months ago, reports indicating that the NSA spied on the private communications of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff began to surface. Now comes word via Bloomberg that Brazil is working hard to develop a phone that it hopes will effectively be impossible to breach. More →

We’ve written extensively about security concerns in recent weeks, but this might be the most shocking development yet. Reddit user FallenMyst posted on Tuesday that he had recently started a new job with a company called Walk N’Talk Technologies.

At his job, he is asked to listen back to seemingly random bits of audio and provides feedback on how they match with the text that the device outputs when translating the audio ‚ and you won’t believe where the audio comes from. More →

A few days ago, a report revealed that spy agencies including the NSA and GCHQ, managed to bypass the security of SIM card manufacturer Gemalto and gain access to valuable encryption keys that protect cellphone signals. Even though Gemalto denied the reports, but The Verge points out that the hack might be more serious than initially believed, as it could give agencies the ability of infecting any phone using these specific SIM cards with additional spyware programs. More →

News broke late last week that Lenovo had been shipping laptops with man-in-the-middle adware preinstalled which could hijack HTTPS traffic and insert its own ads onto websites that users were visiting.

This major security threat was initially found lurking in just two pieces of software on Lenovo’s computers, but the number rose dramatically over the weekend as Ars Technica reports security researchers discovered more applications riddled with adware. As of Sunday, at least 14 applications have been found to use the technology which puts users at risk. More →

Lenovo has been justifiably catching a lot of grief this week for preloading dangerous adware called Superfish onto its computers that hijacks HTTPS traffic to inject ads onto encrypted websites. While there are plenty of ways to remove this obnoxious adware yourself, Neowin reports that Microsoft may have just done the job for you. More →

After news broke this week that Lenovo was putting dangerous adware on its computers, the company responded by removing the offending software from new machines and disabling it on the computers it had already shipped with. The company also insisted that the adware posed no security risks to any of its customers, a statement that was met with incredulity by security experts. However, the company has now admitted that installing Superfish onto its computers opened up big security holes that it’s now scrambling to fix.

Android’s malware problem might be overstated, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be cautious when navigating the web on your device. On Wednesday, anti-virus software maker AVG reported that a newly discovered malware can continue to spy on you even after you think you’ve turned off your device. More →

If you follow anything having to do with tech on the Internet, you have undoubtedly read something about Superfish in the past 24 hours. In a nutshell, Lenovo sold tons of computers with software called Superfish Visual Discovery pre-installed. Lenovo has been selling computers preloaded with Superfish for the past two years, and the software is supposed to help serve alternative, image-heavy ads in Google search results.

As it turns out, however, Superfish is a pretty frightening piece of adware. More →